Application Development
ServiceNow’s own story: Leaving no customer behind
In this new series of Now on Now stories, we share how we use ServiceNow products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire you--our customers and partners--to achieve even greater business value and resiliency through the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Customer Workflows Book of Knowledge.
Any company in a competitive industry knows the importance of excellent customer service. Nowadays, it’s more important than ever, given the sudden and unprecedented changes to the economy, the workplace and employees and their families, due to the pandemic. One thing the COVID era has not changed – and, in fact, has likely exacerbated – is the need among B2C and B2B customers for rapid, effective customer care.
Self-service plays a critical part in the solution. Not all customer problems or questions require a live person, and we know that an increasing number of customers prefer to help themselves. That’s where things get tricky, because not all self-service options are created equally.
ServiceNow uses the capabilities of its own Now Platform and ServiceNow Customer Service Management to help customers resolve their own issues while ensuring that customer satisfaction either remains steady or improves.
Leaving no customer behind
Luke Morris, Director of Service Management at ServiceNow, views self-service as one of his biggest responsibilities. His other challenge is maintaining and improving a 9.2 satisfaction score while accommodating a 30% growth in business year over year.
“After interviewing thousands of customers about what they expected and needed from us and analyzing hundreds of manual and repetitive processes, we were able to transform our own service organization to enable the customer to confidently help themselves,” Morris said.
Self-service should be always be the customer’s first option, before picking up the phone. “We start with a robust support portal,” Morris said. “We know who the person is when they sign on via mobile or desktop, what products they have, and even if there is a service issue, [so] the Now Portal provides a personalized self-service experience for them.”
Curating the best problem-solving content
A critical component of customer service is Knowledge Management, which serves as a cornerstone to customer self-service and helps agents quickly deliver solutions to live customers.
ServiceNow’s own Knowledge Base (KB) has 2.7 million views/year and is one of the most popular methods for customers to find answers. Additionally, agents can efficiently create or update articles in real time as part of the case-resolution process. As a result, cases with KB articles attached are being solved 40% faster, with a 200% increase in newly created articles. (Learn more in this blog.)
Promoting self-service options
ServiceNow uses a chatbot to engage customers and automatically offer the latest resources to resolve issues. Customers also have access to a 220K-strong ServiceNow user Community that is ready to share advice. And customers that fail to get answers from the Community are automatically offered the option to open a case with an agent. This approach makes sure no customer is ever left feeling without capable resources.
Besides the high satisfaction score, other meaningful outcomes include:
87,000 customers conducting millions of annual self-help searches
Only 10% of customers contacting technical support via the telephone
35 million annual views of community pages
10,000 net-new knowledge articles created annually with a 20% increase in consumption of those articles
$18 million in savings when 100,000 manual requests were resolved by customer self-service
Customers will always need quality service. In the new normal we are all working under, customer service organizations that shift from manual, disjointed processes to digital workflows, self-service, automated services, and mobile connectivity will realize the most customer-service success.
To learn more about customer support self-service strategies, check out these resources:
Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: BRE1077 Now on Now: Resolving issues 50% faster with CSM – Part 1, customer experience
Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: BRE1094 Now on Now: Knowledge-Centered Service allow agents to resolve issues 50% faster
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